Few things divide and provoke American Jews like the question of Zionism.

Few things divide and provoke American Jews like the question of Zionism. Though
many wish to remember otherwise, this was also the case before the founding of
Israel in 1948; and, though many wish to forget, the story of Zionism in America
belongs not just to Labor Zionism, dominated by culturalists and secularists,
but also to Orthodox Jews.

Recently Yeshiva University’s Center for
Israel Studies held a symposium on the history of religious Zionism in America.
The questions raised by this history have profound implications for the future
of Jews and of Israel.

According to Rabbi Yosef Blau, president of the
Religious Zionists of America and mashgiah ruhani – spiritual advisor – of YU’s
Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), the religious Zionist, or
Mizrachi, movement began in Europe at the turn of the 20th century and arrived
in America on the eve of World War I. American Jews generally, and Orthodox
Zionists in particular, were split between the earlier German generation and the
newly arrived East Europeans.

Zionism was further split between Orthodox
Zionists and the largely non-Orthodox American Zionist mainstream. During World
War I, amid the fragmentation, cut off from the European leadership, the
Mizrachi movement foundered.

But important foundations within Orthodoxy
were laid. One was the “auxiliary” Mizrachi Women’s Group, fiercely independent
and hardly auxiliary. Other foundations were the Teachers Institute at what
would become Yeshiva University, the newly established day schools dedicated to
Ivrit b’Ivrit, or teaching Hebrew in Hebrew, and the B’nei Akiva religious
Zionist youth movement. After the war, the Mizrachi movement was rejuvenated
through partnerships with Yeshiva University and the RIETS.

In contrast,
a delegation from the anti-Zionist Agudat Israel movement, arriving from Europe
in 1921, was met with decisive rejection by American Jews. As described by
Professor Jess Olson of Yeshiva University, another speaker at the symposium,
the Aguda delegation delivered an unthinkable message of deference to Torah
sages on political matters and refused to recognize as Orthodox any Jew who was
a Zionist.

They won no support, even on the Lower East Side, and were
relegated to marginality in America.

INSTEAD, SAID Rabbi Michael
Rosenzweig, professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University, the institutions and
personalities of American modern Orthodoxy made Zionism a fundamental
tenet.

Generations of rabbis graduating from Yeshiva and RIETS integrated
Israel and Zionism into Orthodox thought. The key figure in this development
was, of course, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who succeeded his father as head
of RIETS in 1941.

For all believing Jews, the creation of the State of
Israel was a theological challenge: Was it a portent of the messianic age of the
Jewish people? Soloveitchik answered with a strong defense of both Diaspora
Judaism and the Zionist project, which remains dominant in American
Orthodoxy.

Indeed, over time Soloveitchik’s religious Zionism has become,
both conceptually and demographically, the center of American Zionism as a
whole.

Soloveitchik’s intellectual counterpart, who had built his own
foundations earlier in Palestine, was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, for whom the
Jewish people's return to their land was an explicit part of the divine plan for
redemption.

Scion of a famous Lithuanian yeshiva, Kook moved to Palestine
in 1904 and in 1924 he founded his famous yeshiva, Merkaz Harav Kook, which has
long been an epicenter of religious Zionism. He became Ashkenazi chief rabbi of
the British Mandate before his death in 1935.

As speaker Rabbi Shalom
Carmy showed, Kook’s religious thought was heavily engaged with 19thcentury
philosophy. His disagreements with Maimonides reflected insights from
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Modern art and science lowered morality but, in an
almost Hegelian dialectic, all would work out according to the divine
plan.

THE QUESTIONS remain. Where is the center of Jewish life? To what
extent is it tied to the Land of Israel – defined how and by whom? Who leads the
Jewish people, and by what right? Is Israel the answer to the Jewish Question in
this world or the next? These questions cannot be answered by reference to
artificial polarities between Kook and Soloveitchik, even between Agudat Israel
and Mizrachi.

In a 1947 letter to Agudat Israel, David Ben-Gurion, then
head of the Yishuv, guaranteed full rights in the coming State of Israel to
non-Jewish citizens – but agreed that the state would mandate Sabbath observance
for Jews, kosher food in “every state kitchen,” and marriage supervised so as to
“satisfy the needs of the religiously observant”; moreover, “no steps” would be
taken that “adversely affect the religious awareness and religious conscience of
any part of Israel.”

These concessions, along with the draft exemption
for yeshiva students, have become the core of Israel’s internal cold war. The
rabbinate controls Jewish life from birth to marriage and conversion to death.
Haredi religious parties occupy government ministries and channel resources to
their evergrowing communities, which have the country’s highest levels of
poverty and lowest levels of labor participation, while settlers find
theological justifications to defy the state and demand its protection and
subsidies at once. In a sense, American religious Zionism has abetted these
developments.

American Jews are now undergoing one of their periodic
paroxysms over Zionism. Liberal Jews are as unnerved by strong expressions of
religious belief as they are by unapologetic nationalism. Compounding matters
are bad neighbors and perfectionist aspirations.

Secular American Zionism
seems to have foundered on its own contradictory expectations and now
contributes few to aliya; religious Zionism thrives but is used for explicitly
or implicitly illiberal ends.

Within Israel, “Jewish nationalism” is
becoming less nationalist, in the sense of dedication to the nation-state, and
more Jewish, making the state a means to a theological end. The distinction is
profound. The real and potential breadth of the people is constrained by a
narrowness of religious expression. To correct this asymmetry, what may be
required is just what Soloveitchik called for: a strong, assertive,
theologically self-assured Diaspora Orthodoxy.